A zooming user interface (ZUI) is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) in which the scale of a viewed area is changed in order to view more detail or less, and to browse through and among different visual display elements such as images, shapes, documents, or videos. Display elements may be added to a graphical workspace referred to as a ‘canvas’ to create a zoomable presentation in which details and subtopics can be presented through zooming in and out to reveal more or to reveal less detail. Typically, the canvas is larger than a ZUI viewing window generated on an electronic device display screen, and a user can scroll a ZUI viewing window across the canvas to view different display elements disposed on different regions of the canvas. The ZUI differs from a normal canvas in that the user may zoom in or out from a display element. Display elements can be inserted anywhere among the presentation content. Users can pan across the canvas in two dimensions (in 2D) and zoom into objects of interest. Display elements present inside a zoomed region can in turn be zoomed themselves to reveal additional detail, allowing for recursive nesting and an arbitrary level of zoom. For example, as a user zooms into a text object, the text may be represented initially as a small dot, then as a thumbnail image, next as a complete page and finally as a magnified view of a portion of the page focused on a key passage from the text. After zooming in to view a display element, a user may zoom out and pan across the canvas and zoom in to a different display element. Thus, ZUIs use zooming as the primary metaphor for browsing through multivariate or hyperlinked information, for example.